Archive for July, 2012

The team responsible for acclaimed indie mood piece Dear Esther has unveiled Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

As reported by BeefJack, this first person project from thechineseroom will examine how the inhabitants of a small town respond to an apocalyptic event. Though the story takes place in an expansive open world, each instance of the game will be limited to one hour, ensuring that it you’ll need to play it multiple times in order to experience everything it has to offer.

As you explore a town lovingly constructed with CryEngine 3, you’ll encounter six different personalities. Creative director Dan Pinchbeck told BeefJack that these characters are actually “almost kind of memory traces of people that were there”. Apparently these mysterious figures will “go about their lives regardless of your presence, but you can interact with them, influencing their actions and effects they’ll have on the world.”

A new Dungeon Keeper style strategy game is in production at Cyanide. Impire will see you step into the boots of a once great demon now trapped in the body of a lowly imp. In order to reclaim your place at the top of the villain food chain, you’ll need to construct a dungeon hideout and populate it with all manner of gruesome beasts and diabolical traps. Your aim is to slay any adventurer foolish enough to set foot in your domain.

Cyanide is the developer of Pro Cycling Manager, Horse Racing Manager and Pro Rugby Manager. That’s probably a mite misleading, as Cyanide also has plenty of experience in the fantasy genre, having worked on licensed fare such as Game of Thrones and Blood Bowl, as well as original content like Dungeon Party and Loki. The studio is also hard at work on Of Orcs and Men, due on multiple platforms later this year.

According to Publisher Paradox Interactive, Impire will arrive on PC in Q1 2013.

Square Enix is pulling out all the stops in a bid to salvage its troubled MMO Final Fantasy XIV. A title update dubbed A Realm Reborn will see the game world decimated by some sort of calamity. The brief announcement clip seems to indicate that while many things about the game will change, existing player characters will emerge from the disaster more or less intact. Square Enix is yet to release a definitive list of new features.

Final Fantasy XIV launched in September 2010, but due to a range of technical and gameplay issues, its publisher elected not to charge users for access until January 2012. In December 2010, original producer Hiromichi Tanaka stepped aside and his replacement Naoki Yoshida began work on what would become A Realm Reborn. Will the overhaul be enough to revive the game’s flagging fortunes?

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn will not only transform the PC edition of Final Fantasy XIV, it will also be the first version of game to be released on PS3. According to Square Enix, this reworked epic will arrive on both platforms “soon”.